returned to a country divided, their status as British military veterans complicating their relationship with the emerging Irish Free State.
The historian Fergus D’Arcy opens his survey of war memorials in Ireland by noting that the service of Irish soldiers to the First World War was for many years ‘a story woefully neglected and willfully forgotten’.10 This sentiment has been echoed by the historian John Horne, who has argued that ‘from the Second World War the memory of the Great War was increasingly denied in the public life and self-understanding of independent Ireland’.11 While many recent histories have rectified the denial and neglect, the question of remembering and commemorating the Irish dead of the First World War continues to provoke controversy.
What role do Ireland’s Memorial Records play in remembrance? The intent of books of remembrance is to offer a tangible object for reflection. Not only do they provide evidence of the service record of the dead, but also they elevate the names to a semi-sacred status of sacrifice for the nation. Paired with a memorial space, such as a chapel within a cathedral or a dedicated war memorial, rolls of remembrance offer powerful connections between the individual and the nation. In several major Anglican cathedrals in England, such as Canterbury, St Paul’s, and Manchester, services of remembrance surrounding the regimental rolls of the dead continue to take place daily, weekly, or monthly. These rituals of ‘turning of the pages’, connect the living, the dead, the church, and the state. Ireland’s Memorial Records are displayed within Church of Ireland cathedrals, and similar page-turning rituals were intended initially to take place in Ireland.
Abstracted from memory rituals, as richly illustrated, finely-produced books, the Records tell us about the relationship of art and culture to Irish politics during the pivotal decade that encompassed the First World War and Irish independence. To build a modern and identifiable Irish cultural identity, Irish arts were inspired by history. In 1916, Padraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, published four pamphlets outlining the political philosophy of past leaders Wolfe Tone, John Mitchel, Thomas Davis, and James Fintan Lalor, thereby connecting their ideals and sacrifices to the contemporary Irish cause. Exploring similar paths in literature and the arts, William Butler Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, and John Millington Synge were instrumental in creating a national Irish voice in literature and drama. An Irish Arts and Crafts movement, led in part by the Yeats sisters, Susan (known as Lily) and Elizabeth (known as Lolly), investigated the means for incorporating Irish themes with Irish materials.12 Also working to establish a Celtic Revival were George Russell (known by the pseudonym AE, short for Aeon, or ‘life’) and his group of mystical visionary poets. Harry Clarke was part of this immense creative moment in Ireland. However, Clarke, like his contemporary James Joyce, not only looked to the symbols and stories of Irish history, but also was influenced by European modernism. Clarke’s social connection with advanced nationalists from Ireland enabled him to synthesize continental elements of the avant-garde with the artistic language of the Celtic Revival. The power of the illustrations for Ireland’s Memorial Records is evident in their complicated design, which demonstrates influences of modernist art while incorporating Celtic themes. Just as the First World War was an event in which modern technology was introduced into nineteenth-century battle tactics, so also Harry Clarke’s illustrations blended international modernism with the nineteenth-century aesthetics of the Celtic Revival and Arts and Crafts movements.
As later chapters will detail, there are many influences on the design of the borders in Ireland’s Memorial Records, including the Book of Kells. For one, Nicola Gordon Bowe records that Clarke consulted photographs in The Irish Soldier, a six-issue magazine about the war published by Eason’s, and part of a British ministry of information recruiting initiative.13 Secondly, Clarke’s striking use of silhouetted figures in the Records, were suggested by a widely used recruiting-poster technique. Clarke would have seen these posters in Dublin and during his trips to England. Captain H. Lawrence Oakley was to become particularly well-known for his posters and his series of trench-life silhouettes in the Illustrated London News, titled ‘Oakley of the Bystander’.14 Third, several drawings of soldiers in motion suggest that Clarke had army training manuals at his disposal; these manuals offered photographs and diagrams of the proper way that grenades should be handled. I argue in a later chapter that Clarke also drew on the innovations of cinema, a popular new visual technology that promised narrative possibilities for arranging images in sequence.
Therefore, rather than an isolated creative work, Ireland’s Memorial Records are part of an outpouring of commemorative art and architecture that extended around the globe. With over one million dead in Great Britain, individual artists and religious and cultural institutions sought ways to respectfully commemorate the dead. As already mentioned, this need was so great that the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts held exhibitions to inspire and provide guidelines for memorials. Issues of The Studio from 1919 and 1920, which Clarke read, are filled with articles about new memorial work.15 Therefore, not only were artists busy with commissions, they were interested in uniting traditional memorial styles with their own artistic vision.
FIGURE 1.2
‘Think!’ (1914) by Harry Lawrence Oakley. Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, Great Britain. © Imperial War Museum Q33144.
The general historical trend of the past few decades has been to see Ireland’s Memorial Records as a static list of military information, focusing particularly on the 49,435 names printed in the eight volumes. They have been compared to the official publications by His Majesty’s Stationary Office, Soldiers Died in the Great War (1921) and Officers Died in the Great War (1919) – and they have been found wanting in their level of comprehensiveness and detail. Clarke’s illustrations are almost incidental in the case of debates over the textual content.
If we step back, however, we can see that even the list of names is mobile: it has been challenged, authenticated, studied, and changed. Historians, journalists, and citizens have uncovered hundreds of names of Irish servicemen in the war.16 The centennial’s focus on ordinary citizens, the contributions by the Irish citizenry to the war effort, the peace movement, and the discourse surrounding the war demonstrate that a bound list of 49,435 names represents only a fraction of those whose lives were lost as a result of the war. The list might include munitions workers, veterinarians, and those who died of physical wounds long after the Armistice. In other words, it’s important to recognize that Ireland’s Memorial Records have informed and developed dialogue for decades. Any Irish historian working with the First World War has had some engagement at some level with Ireland’s Memorial Records.
This book is designed to tell the story of how and why Ireland’s Memorial Records were published, how they were conceived from the beginning as part of a physical national memorial, and how Harry Clarke infused the decorative borders with his own distinctive vision. While Ireland’s Memorial Records have been listed as part of Clarke’s oeuvre, they have not been extensively studied in terms of their art and their history. The history of Ireland’s Memorial Records offers a glimpse into the life of Dublin during the wars. The cast of characters is sweeping, including, in addition to Clarke himself, Andrew Jameson, William Orpen, Edwin Lutyens, Seán Keating, Joseph Maunsell Hone, George Roberts, and Sir John French, all of whom, in one way or another, affected the outcome of the books or the disposition of the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. What emerges is a fascinating story of how Dublin’s unionist and nationalist leaders worked together to create a unique memorial record of the Irish dead from the First World War, the same unionism and nationalism that ultimately divided Ireland and fostered competing
